After a dismal third season, The Flash got up, dusted itself off, and went about trying to fix things for Season 4. To start, things looked promising. The series found some joy again and some comedy; yes it was a little forced and maybe too sophomoric (especially thanks to the addition of Ralph Dibney, whose humor seemed calibrated to a younger audience), but it was trying. For a few episodes it also put Barry Allen back to work (imagine that!), finally gave Iris something to do, and shook up some of its cast by pairing down the core team so that it all felt like a reset. Best of all, the season’s Big Bad wasn’t a speedster!

All of this was really positive, and yet, The Flash’s fourth season still didn’t come together like its first two seasons did. Maybe the show did miss having a personal connection to a villain, maybe the tones shifted too wildly between humor and seriousness, or maybe it was just because there were really awful storylines like the trial and Barry’s brief stint in prison. Last year, after Season 3, I wrote up 10 things the show needed to do to save itself. And it did most of them! Except many of those changes didn’t last, and it neglected the most important one: making Barry a hero and competent leader again.

In that same spirit, here’s a new list that I ever so humbly put forth as potential fixes for a show that I used to absolutely adore, but am now mostly bored by with no emotional connection left to its characters. Bring me back, Flash!

1. Let Barry Be a Hero

After the mess that was Season 3’s handling of Flashpoint, Barry spent that entire season atoning for a mistake he made out of sadness and love. Cut the dude some slack! Season 4 saw a reformed Barry no longer messing with time, but also, messing with time could have helped solve a lot of the problems that the team came up against. That aside, the more pressing issue is that for the most part, Barry is still kind of an idiot. He’s a terrible teacher (and I can’t understand why the team keeps asking him to teach them or new members anything — he’s the actual worst instructor), he’s not a particularly good team leader (his skills are essentially saying “don’t help me, I can do this myself!” … which is never true), and he never bothers with a backup plan. Most of Season 4’s plotting revolved around Barry’s failures, and was often contingent upon them. Making your hero a loser should never be the anchor to a superhero series unless it’s trying to purposefully subvert the genre. I don’t care what Barry Allen is like in the comics — this Barry Allen is better as a hero. Let him be one.

Further, there are ways to keep Barry as goofy and likable while still allowing him to be the person that unites the team. Iris’ new position as team organizer, essentially, can work as a partnership with Barry rather than taking away his responsibilities or leaving her with nothing to do. The Flash wants us to buy into this “we are the Flash” business, well, start by making the Flash someone we’d want to join in with.

2. Bring Back Metas of the Week

Almost every TV show now thinks it needs to be a single narrative story broken up into chapters, but friends, when you have 22 hours of story to fill in a season that’s not going to work. As I have mentioned constantly since it happened, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. did a very smart thing last year by breaking up its season into three distinct arcs (Ghost Rider, Hydra, and Life Model Decoys). Legends of Tomorrow’s third season also created several mini-villains that led up to one major villain that we didn’t even really meet until the season was almost over. It worked beautifully. Though The Flash Season 4 did toy with having more of a Meta-of-the-Week feel with the Bus Metas, there were only a handful of them, and the DeVoe storyline was given its own focus far too early on.

Admittedly, the team trying to figure out how the bus metas all played into DeVoe’s plans was fun for awhile, but per usual, too much time was spend on the team flailing around for episode after episode, guessing wildly and being wrong, and ultimately failing. It’s why the defeat of DeVoe — for the love of Dibney? — not only didn’t make sense, it wasn’t earned. It was, essentially, another failure that led them there. Yeah, we get that the show values the heart over the brain (something that it drilled into us again and again this season) but also … it doesn’t have to be either/or.

The Flash is a show that actually works really well as a procedural, and by allowing the team to fight more metas (including helping ones who aren’t evil, maybe they just have powers that they can’t exactly control) on a weekly basis (and maybe having some of those metas escape and recur) it would also give them the opportunity to win sometimes.

3. More Police Work

Remember when Barry worked at CCPD? Remember how Joe is a detective? For a few episodes at the start of both Season 3 and Season 4, the show did, too. Barry actually did forensic work! Dibney and Joe went to try and suss out who DeVoe was! But then, as always, it’s forgotten. Get Barry back on the force and maybe, I don’t know, use the power of Team Flash to actually solve some human crimes? What if Barry helped Joe try to solve the mystery of a serial killer? It’s something that speed can’t inherently solve. Supergirl balances this really well — in addition to the crazy, universe-spanning alien stuff, Kara is almost always showing up to a pizza dinner or drinks at the bar having just stopped a runaway train, or saved a kid from drowning, or stopped a shooter. It’s all in a day’s work for a city’s superhero, but Team Flash very rarely focuses on municipal crimes — something that Cisco and Caitlin could also easily handle if Barry is working on other, bigger things. Speaking of which …

4. Give Characters Other than Barry Their Own Stories

Even when Cisco was dating Gypsy, or when Caitlin was struggling with Killer Frost (and her “other life” with Amunet), Barry was always around. Grant Gustin is super charming, we get it, but it’s ok to have scenes that he’s not in -- ones outside of S.T.A.R. Labs, to put a point on it. Again, even the Waverider crew on Legends leave the ship every once in awhile and go to Aruba. Kara and her friends on Supergirl have a couple of different places they hang out to unwind from work. Team Flash almost never leaves the lab. Barry and Iris have a loft, and sometimes everyone goes over to Joe’s for a seasonal party, but you never see anyone actually hanging out on their own, beyond the lab, and having a life. Give Cisco, Caitlin, and whatever version of Wells they bring back next year something to do outside of work. And while you’re at it, give them some viable love interests, please. Barry and Iris are a great power couple, but one of the things that The Flash has really been missing is some good ol’ relationship drama. The is the CW — don’t play. Oh and by the way, those relationships don’t have to be with a meta, nor do those significant others need to be given pregnancy powers to make them interesting. Come on.

5. Give Us the Right Wells

I think most of us would agree that Wellsobard, i.e. Wells 1.0 i.e. actually Eobard Thawne, was the best Wells. He was a real mentor to the team, and wasn’t unnecessarily quirky. Earth-2 Wells is fine, though the brain stuff with him this season was messy (and every new Council of Wells more cringeworthy than the last). He also may be best buds with Cisco, but he has no relationship with Caitlin anymore, nor does he seem to have much of a connection to Barry or Iris. HR was, well, something else … mostly an irritant, though he was given a noble demise.

At the end of Season 4, Earth-2 Harry gained a heart but lost a 7 PhD-capable brain, and left for his own Earth to see his daughter who, let us not forget, had no idea that her father went full Flowers for Algernon over the last several months.

It seems reasonable that Harry won’t return in the new season, because the team doesn’t need another dad — it has Joe. It does, however, need a mentor to help keep these crazy kids on point with their science and tech, which is something Wellsobard was great at doing. Would the original Wells, before his skin suit was used for Eobard, be able to do the same? From what The Flash has already shown us, “normal” Harrys throughout the multi-verse are difficult to find. Maybe pluck one from the timeline? All we know for sure is that another novelty Harry would be a mistake. Let’s not make it again.

6. Bring Back Time Travel

After two seasons of atonement, I think it’s time Barry got involved with the Speed Force again. As loathe as I am to recommend this, because the show has almost never handled it well, it makes sense for the character. Barry has an extraordinary ability — he needs to use it. And with the advent of his and Iris’ daughter Nora in the Season 4 finale, it seems like traveling through time is going to play a major role in the upcoming season. Just let Barry be good at it this time, maybe?

The Flash returns for Season 5 in October on The CW.